"As long as the Nazis are seen as the epitome of evil, there will be a demand for explanations" (Image: Topham Picturepoint)

From Churchill's nuclear predictions to Darwin's influence on the Nazis, four books explore the deeper levels of a history that continues to fascinate us

THE idea that we can learn from the past and avoid repeating it makes sense only if someone else is around to remember what happened. Historians have been aided in this task by memory traces that increase in quantity and quality the closer we get to the present. A watershed was reached in the second world war, the first major international conflict to be readily available to the mass media.

But why are we still fascinated by an event that ended nearly 70 years ago? Part of the answer is because so many people who are still living were involved in or affected by the war. Another part lies in a need to settle old scores, especially with the Nazis. As long as they are seen as the epitome of evil, there will be a demand for explanations that enable us to cordon off that "evil". And then there is the worry that we too may be living in times when the heady mix of science, power and exigency could result in actions as extreme as the ones taken by the Nazis and their opponents.

It is rare to see anyone stressing the positive legacies of the second world war for science and technology. These are fairly obvious: the research agendas of nuclear energy, rocketry, genetics, cancer and ecology were all expedited by the war. Arguably the threat of sustained military engagement has the best track record in hastening the advancement of science and technology. Academia and market forces can appear desultory by comparison, as the efforts of the former are divided into ever more specialised problems, and those of the latter are expended in chasing fickle consumers. There is nothing like the fear of annihilation to focus the best minds on taking us to the next level of technical achievement. Certainly this was Winston Churchill's opinion.

As biographer Graham Farmelo shows in Churchill's Bomb, Churchill managed to redeem his faltering performance as a minister in the first world war by elevating the "atomic bomb" from a neologism created by H. G. Wells to an existential risk in one deft essay, "Shall We All Commit Suicide?" Published in 1924, the essay stands as a brilliant testimony to the power of science fiction to fuel the political imagination.

Three other recently published books attack the Nazis from various angles. Was Hitler a Darwinian? is a "greatest hits" package from Robert J. Richards, a US historian of evolutionary theory, that aims to settle scores against historians on both the political left and right who, he thinks, overplay Darwin's influence on the Nazi imagination.

Population control

Richards sees this problem as urgent. But he never quite explains why, and ends up devoting much space to the obvious non-Darwinian roots of Hitler's racism and anti-semitism, which was to do with a kind of biblical naturalism that would have black people descend from cursed sons of Noah, and Jews cursed for having killed Christ.

He becomes more interesting when he discusses the tortured arguments of the professional biologists at the time. These are very much worth revisiting today.

Unfortunately, there is an elephant in the room: "racial hygiene", the most influential German medical ideology in the 50 years preceding the second world war. Unlike the biblically based racists, the biologists raised issues of population control, euthanasia and eugenics. They targeted "counter-selectionist" social policies that perpetuated the lives of "unfit" people who would have perished (or never have been born) had natural selection been given a free hand. Policies such as mass vaccination were held responsible for rates of population growth and resource consumption that allegedly stoked imperial expansion – and the violent reactions to it.

Racial hygienists generally positioned themselves on the political left, identifying with ecological and pacifist causes. Their intellectual leader, Alfred Ploetz, was both a Nobel peace prize nominee and a Nazi. On all this Richards is conspicuously – and regrettably – silent.

It is relatively easy to show the Darwinian roots of Nazism, compared to the much harder task of demonstrating the mental pathology of Nazi politicians and scientists. In The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, journalist Jack El-Hai gives a fresh twist to the failure of US military psychiatrists to arrive at a morally satisfying diagnosis of the Nazi leaders for "crimes against humanity".

He approaches the matter from the perspective of US Military Intelligence Corps officer Douglas Kelley, who was chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison during the war trials. Kelley could not see much difference between the personality of Hitler's heir apparent, Hermann Göring, and that of a highly motivated top corporate executive. El-Hai suggests that Kelley shared some of these qualities, and Kelley even ended his life Göring-style, by taking a cyanide capsule.

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